The University of Missouri-Rolla has received CIO magazine’s “CIO 100″ award for 2006 for its efforts to create a unified web presence based on reusable content and a single content-management platform.

The CIO 100 award is presented annually by CIO magazine to recognize organizations that use innovative information technology management and practices. This year’s award recipients are being recognized for unique practices and innovative results in information technology.

UMR and the other CIO 100 recipients will be recognized during the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards Ceremony to be held Aug. 20-22 in Coronado, Calif.

“We’re honored to be included in CIO magazine’s list of the 100 most innovative organizations,” says UMR Chancellor John F. Carney III. “This recognition is a high honor for UMR and a fitting tribute to the many campus organizations who worked together to reinvent UMR’s web presence in recent years.”

The CIO 100 award is in recognition of UMR’s “web unification project,” a two-year effort to unify the campus’ web presence through a consistent visual identity and the use of syndication to publish relevant news, feature stories and other information to various subsections of the UMR web.

The project began in the spring of 2004 with the development of a consistent look for the sites of UMR’s 21 academic departments and four college and university websites. The project continued with the development of a new gateway (www.mst.edu) that was unveiled in July 2005; the creation of a news website that uses a feature of the content-management platform, Documentum, to “push” news stories to the academic websites; the use of “really simple syndication” (RSS) feeds to allow users to subscribe to UMR news; and the recent creation of a web presence for prospective students.

“This project represents a significant technical advancement and cultural shift in how we gather, structure, reuse and share content, both inside UMR and to the outside world,” says Randy Tucker, UMR’s chief information officer.

The CIO 100 award is the second major recognition UMR has received for its web and IT environment. In January, UMR was named one of the nation’s “25 most connected campuses” by the Princeton Review and Forbes.com. That recognition came for “demonstrated leadership in preparing and supporting students for life in the digital age,” said Rob Franek of the Princeton Review.